Darwin Core

A body of standards, including a glossary of terms (in other contexts these might be called properties, elements, fields, columns, attributes, or concepts) intended to facilitate the sharing of information about biological diversity by providing reference definitions, examples, and commentaries.

Sponsored by Biodiversity Information Standards (TWDG), the current standard was last modified in October 2009.

Summary Edit

Standard Website
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/index.htm
Specification
http://www.tdwg.org/standards/450
Related Vocabularies
Audubon Core
GBIF Vocabularies
Mappings
ABCD (Access to Biological Collection Data)
Subjects
Life Sciences
Disciplines
Biodiversity
Biogeography
Botany
Cartography
Ecology
Geoscience
Marine Science
Marine Zoology
Maritime Geography
Palaeontology
Topography
Zoology

Extensions Add

Apple Core Edit

Darwin Core documentation and recommendations for herbaria.

Darwin Core Geospatial Extension Edit

A protocol-independent XML schema for a geospatial extension to the Darwin Core.

DwC Germplasm Edit

An extension to the Darwin Core standard, it includes additional terms required to describe plant genetic resources and in particular germplasm seed samples.

Tools Add

Darwin Core Archive Assistant Edit

A web application that offers data publishers wishing to serve to the GBIF network an easy interface for describing data elements as basic text files, composing an appropriate XML Darwin Core descriptor file to accompany them.

Darwin Core Archive Validator Edit

A tool to validate XML metadata against the Darwin Core Text Guidelines.

Integrated Publishing Toolkit Edit

A software platform using Darwin Core and EML to facilitate the efficient publishing of biodiversity data on the Internet, using the GBIF network.

Use Cases Add

Atlas of Living Australia Edit

An aggregation of information on all the known species in Australia, collected from museums, herbaria, community groups, government departments, individuals and universities. All data is converted to Darwin Core.

GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) Edit

Established by a global network of countries and organizations, GBIF is a web portal promoting and facilitating the mobilization, access, discovery and use of biodiversity data. The preferred format for publishing data to the GBIF network is the Darwin Core Archive, and its Integrated Publishing Toolkit uses EML as its data standard.

OBIS (Ocean Biogeographic Information System) Edit

A data repository for marine species datasets from all of the world's oceans; it uses an extension of Darwin Core 2 as its data standard.

Rebioma Edit

A web portal using Darwin Core to describe biodiversity data collected in Madagascar.

VertNet Edit

Four distributed database networks (MaNIS, HerpNET, ORNIS and FishNet) using a Darwin Core engine to make bioinformatics specimen data interoperable, mappable and publicly available.